


This Time Around

by reindeersidecar



Series: The Way They Were [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Timeline, F/F, Nothing explicit just mentions of sex, Some other characters cameo too but it's pharmercy centric, and through the ages, in which Angela knows Fareeha when they're younger, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 09:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7430605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reindeersidecar/pseuds/reindeersidecar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In my eyes the stars are cornered between crimson and clover. They found a way to jump over, meanwhile I'm still getting older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Time Around

When Angela sees Fareeha at first, she can’t help but chuckle at the Eye of Horus scrawled in black pencil liner around her right eye. The twelve-year-old is standing in the doorway of the med bay wearing cargoes, a black tank, and combat boots that were likely too heavy for her twiggy, little legs to lift.

She crosses her arms with a haughty cock to her hip. “What’s so funny?”

Angela tries to bite back her smile. She’s seventeen, no longer a child, but she’s no killjoy, despite what Jack says. She can humor the girl. “Nothing. I like your tattoo.”

Fareeha grins. “Isn’t it neat? I can get the real thing when I’m eighteen. Mama said she’ll take me to the tattoo parlor herself.” She rocks back on her heels with barely contained excitement. “Wait until she sees this. Is she here?”

She is, but Angela hesitates to answer. Past examples tell her that Ana would dismiss her daughter’s enthusiasm with that cool, professional air that was so inextricably her. Fareeha’s every attempt to please her mother always seems to be met with barely feigned interest—at best. Angela has seen the young girl with her head hung, dragging her feet past the med bay door far too many times.

“No, she’s out,” Angela says. Her breath catches in the lie, but Fareeha doesn’t seem to notice. The girl frowns a bit, but it’s hardly the upset she would have endured had Ana seen her.

“I guess I’ll show her at home, then,” Fareeha mumbles to herself.

She smudges the eyeliner from her face on the way out, when she thinks Angela can’t see. They both know that by the time Ana gets home, Fareeha will be fast asleep.

 

* * *

  
“She’s not here, is she?”

Angela spins her chair around to find Fareeha leaning against the doorframe of her room. Her mom’s military pants are slung across her hips. They’re big on her, and they pool around her combat boots. The girl turned eighteen a week ago, a proper cadet as of yesterday, and she and Ana had agreed upon today for the girl to receive her tattoo.

Angela bites her lip. “No, Fareeha, she’s not.” It’s the regrettable truth this time.

Fareeha ducks her head. “Right.” Somewhere along the line she outgrew her habit of being disappointed by her mother. She drums her fingertips against Angela’s door a moment, pensive. Then she stands from her lean against the frame. “Okay, guess I’ll head home, then. Goodnight, Angela.”

“Wait,” Angela calls after her. Fareeha backpedals into her doorway. Angela isn’t sure what to say next. She just knows she can’t let that girl walk out that door, looking as sad as she does.  


Angela stands and slides the black trenchcoat off the back of her chair. “I’ll take you.”

Fareeha lets out a funny little laugh. “What?”

Angela douses the lights and shuts the door behind herself. “To get your tattoo. Come on.”

When Angela got dressed this morning, she didn’t anticipate she would have to walk ten blocks through Cairo at night in her high heels and tights, and to a tattoo parlor, no less. She should have, truthfully, knowing Ana’s streak of unreliability. She’s surprised Fareeha comes to headquarters asking for Ana at all at this point.

There is something truly endearing about her admiration for her mother. Something sad, too. Most teens her age on a Friday opt for a night out, smoking shisha at house parties, being drunk and loud. Being young. Fareeha has never seemed to care for those distractions because of her commitment to her mother, and Angela thinks she’s never known what it means to be a kid.

Angela looks up at Fareeha whose her tanned face glows beneath the harsh streetlights. She stands a few inches taller than Angela now, lanky, awkward, hasn’t quite figured out how to own her height. She shivers in her old, black, cotton T.

“Oh, you’re cold. Do you want my jacket?” Angela offers, reaching for her lapel.

“No,” Fareeha says stiffly and Angela swears she sees her blush. “Sorry, I mean, no thank you.”

Angela smiles to herself. Fareeha is nothing if not always courteous.

Angela recalls many a night where Jack and Gabriel would saunter into the med bay, after hours, (a bit tipsy), teasing her about the crush the young Amari was nursing for her. She’s noticed too, of course, when she would discover Fareeha’s dark eyes on her when she looked up, lingering sometimes with more than casual interest. Angela chose not to think about it too hard. Nothing good can come of that.

When the night is over, Fareeha has her right eye tattooed. Angela held her hand through the whole thing. “Better than the eyeliner?” Fareeha asks. She’s sitting in the parlor chair, smiling up at Angela with that boyish, toothy grin of hers.

Angela holds her chin and angles her fresh tattoo towards her. It’s an angry, swollen red. “I don’t know. I kind of liked the eyeliner.”

Fareeha laughs. “Don’t tease me, Angela.” She looks exactly like Ana in that moment, and Angela marvels at this young woman who practically raised herself to be just like the mother who never cared to raise her.

 

* * *

 

Angela buys Fareeha her first drink.

She and all the boys take the birthday girl to a bar, a small pub she, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn found when they were first stationed in Cairo. Angela extended the invitation to Ana, but she didn’t show. Angela notices that Fareeha doesn’t keep many friends of her own, because she lives off-campus from the military academy, or because she’s the daughter of the legendary Ana Amari—Angela hasn’t decided yet. Fareeha looks quite content with her current company though, Jack to one side of her, Angela to the other. Reinhardt and Torbjorn sit across the table, their heads tossed back as their howling laughter fills the bar. Gabriel quietly sips from his mug to Jack’s left.

Angela can’t speak for the boys, but she promises Fareeha she’ll stay sober enough to drive her home. “So have fun tonight, alright?” Fareeha assures her she will, although Angela knows by now the twenty-one-year-old’s idea of fun is staying after hours in their gym, laying into a punching bag. Or a long morning jog at a crisp 5am.

Her fun is paying off, though. It may be the wine talking, but Angela cannot help but notice tonight how broad Fareeha’s shoulders are, the way her T-shirt fits snug over the bulge of her arms, how her strong torso funnels down into that narrow waist of hers. There’s something in the sound of her voice too. Something deep and hard, but also smooth like the sensation of inhaling smoke. She’s grown into her size, and Angela has trouble reconciling that small, scrawny teenager with the built soldier sitting beside her.

Perhaps Angela’s drinking more than she promised she would.

Angela watches her dizzily in the mirror of the pub bathroom as Fareeha leans over the sink to check her make up. She stares at her cleavage in the V of her shirt. When she looks up, Fareeha holds her eyes in the glass. She smiles, and Angela knows she’s been caught. Fareeha straightens and turns to her.

“Something catch your eye, Doctor?” she asks. There’s this smugness about her, and Angela isn’t certain if it’s liquid courage or the young woman’s personal confidence, but she finds it attractive either way. Fareeha didn’t have too much to drink, not as much as Angela at least, but she’s tipsy, and she’s sporting a soft flush of color to show it.

Angela’s head is too cloudy to think of a witty response. Instead she pulls her into a stall and kisses her. She fumbles to slide the lock into place, all the while untucking Fareeha’s shirt from her pants. Fareeha pops open all the buttons of Angela’s blouse and decorates her collarbones and the tops of her breasts with bruising kisses. Fareeha isn’t the awkward mess of long limbs from three years ago. She’s learned a thing or two, and it shows. Angela thinks about how Ana would kill her if she knew she made out with her daughter in the dirty bathroom stall of a bar.

Fareeha has Angela pinned against the stall wall, kissing her silly, when Angela reaches for Fareeha’s belt buckle. Fareeha grabs her wrist.

“We’re drunk,” she breathes against Angela’s mouth.

Angela tugs on Fareeha’s belt loops. “That’s okay.”

“No, Angela,” Fareeha murmurs, and she steps back. “I will not disgrace you in this way.”

She sends Angela home in a cab with her blue bomber jacket around her shoulders. Angela lost a shirt button somewhere. She returns Fareeha’s jacket to her the next day, and they pretend last night never happened. Fareeha is deployed into service a few weeks later.

  
* * *

 

The first time they fall into bed together it’s after she attends Fareeha’s first commendation ceremony in Ana’s stead.

She invites the soldier over to her dorm in HQ for celebratory drinks. She helps her out of her uniform coat with its shiny, new badge, and then she helps her out of her other clothes, and the rest is history.

It becomes a ritual.

Every time Fareeha returns home from service, they spend the night together. It’s nothing serious. Always lighthearted and casual. Angela prefers it that way. Rather that than falling in love with a soldier.

She knows better than to let war take someone she loves from her again.

 

* * *

 

Their ritual takes a long hiatus when Fareeha starts dating a girl back home. Angela pretends it doesn’t bother her.

 

* * *

 

Angela holds the parasol over Fareeha as her mother’s empty casket is lowered into the earth. Overwatch is gone, and she’s presumed dead.

She can barely see the road through the rain and her own tears as she drives Fareeha home from the funeral. She parks in the street in front of her apartment. They fuck the grief out of each other in the backseat. Angela is sure it’s a mistake, but it doesn’t ever feel like one.

 

* * *

 

Angela hasn’t seen Fareeha for five years when Winston initiates the Recall.

She’s charged with the task of conducting everyone’s physical examinations and clearing them for duty. Fareeha strips down to her sports bra and shorts before sitting on the table, and Angela discovers under the harsh fluorescents many new scars on the woman’s body, and her prosthetic legs.

“Land mine,” she says gruffly.

“I’m sorry,” Angela whispers.

They don’t utter a word more than that to each other, and she supposes this is how it will be now. They will be Mercy and Pharah, and nothing more.

Fareeha shivers under the cold metal of the stethoscope and takes a deep breath. “You never wrote me back.”

Angela wants to pretend she’s never received any letters, but they remain unread in a pile on her nightstand. There was something about the ceremony of opening those letters, of having been important enough, cherished enough, for Fareeha to have written them, that reminded Angela too much of waiting at the mailbox for word from her parents. She knew if she opened one envelope, she would keep expecting more to come, and she would have lived in fear of the moment she stopped receiving them.

“You said to stay in touch,” Fareeha utters. It’s an accusation, and Angela can hear the hurt in her voice.

“I know what I said,” Angela answers, sliding the metal up her back. Fareeha inhales deeply again. “Thank you for your letters, Fareeha.”

She laughs under her breath. “Did you even read them?”

“No,” Angela admits.

She reads them that night in bed because Fareeha is here, and she’s safe, and Angela doesn’t have to wait for any more letters to come. She cries into the pages which talk of how much Fareeha missed her, adored her, wanted to be with her. The last letter is dated a year ago, and Angela worries she’s reading old news.

 

* * *

 

“I read your letters,” Angela tells Fareeha, sitting her down against the wall. Talon has them pinned. Their friends hold the line while she tends to Fareeha’s injury behind the temple wall. Now’s really not the time for this conversation, but Angela’s never claimed to have good bedside manner.

Fareeha squints at her through the cracked, yellow visor of her helmet. Blood is running from the wound on her head into her eye. She says nothing, and Angela doesn’t know how to proceed with the conversation. Instead, she lifts Fareeha’s helmet off, sets it down beside her, and gets to work on the bleeding gash in her skull.

“Do you remember when I came into the med bay with that ridiculous eyeliner tattoo?” Fareeha asks suddenly.

Angela smiles to herself. “I do.”

“I knew you were lying to me then,” Fareeha confesses, “when you said my mother wasn’t around.” She laughs. “I think that’s why I liked you so much.”

Angela pauses what she’s doing to meet Fareeha’s eyes. Fareeha grins at her, and Angela tries to force back her own smile. “Is now really the time to be flirting?”

“Sorry, I’ll come back later. When are your office hours, Doctor?”

Angela laughs at her stupid joke and touches a hand to her cheek. “I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you.”

“I think I can decide that for myself, Angela,” Fareeha says quietly. “I’m not that child you have to protect anymore. You took care of me, now let me return the favor.”

Angela finds her request ironic, considering the head injury she’s nursing. She could never stop protecting her, despite her wishes. She loves her too much to do otherwise. But she chooses to humor Fareeha like did that young girl all those years ago.


End file.
